Film Review: Red Dawn remake has plenty of subtext, guerillas in its midst

Film Review: Red Dawn (2.5 stars)

2.5 stars

They’ve remade the 1984 movie Red Dawn, a Cold War fantasy about a group of American teenagers who fight to save their hometown from a Soviet invasion. Of course, that premise was a little unrealistic, so in the new film the teenagers fight to save their town from a North Korean invasion. However — for old time’s sake, plus the screenplay’s tacit assumption that North Korea couldn’t find its own butt with two hands — they have Russian advisors.

Otherwise, we’re back in middle America (Spokane, Wash., this time), where the members of the local high school football team, the Wolverines, awake one morning to find enemy airplanes strafing suburban streets and parachutes blooming like a survivalist wet dream in the sky. The bad guys are here! At last!

This befuddles Matt Eckert (Josh Peck), the talented but selfish Wolverines quarterback who will, one imagines, have to learn some lessons about teamwork if he is going to vanquish anyone, even North Korea. Happily, his big brother Jed (Chris Hemsworth), a U.S. Marine, is in town on leave and — as someone reminds us later — “a marine and his rifle. That’s the baddest (poop)-kickin’ weapon in the world,” although I don’t know how much consideration they’ve given to the (poop)-kickin’ possibilities of a Hollywood screenwriter with a big budget and an agenda of paranoid patriotism.

Matt, Jed and more Wolverines high-tail it to the Eckert cabin in the woods to organize a guerrilla force that will overcome the exotic new enemy. It was China in the original script until the realpolitik of trade and film distribution got in the way — the movie was shot in 2009 but its release was delayed, and China has become a major economic force.

However, North Korea is handy because it has no oil or strategic value, nor does it have much of a movie market. It can, however, unleash an electromagnetic pulse to disable all our computers and bring us to our weakling knees. Thank goodness for the Wolverines, who stand on burned-out buildings shouting their slogan (“Wolverines!”) with the fervour of demented cheerleaders.

Meanwhile, though, there are family wounds to heal, the Eckerts being motherless children who are soon to lose dad to the casual atrocities of Captain Lo, which is a good name for him.

Plus, there are the burgeoning romances, mostly between Matt and Erica (Isabel Lucas), his blond, pillow-lipped girlfriend who has been captured by the Koreans and is being held in — ironically — the old football stadium. He must rescue her, even if it endangers his commitment to team play. Her lips alone are worth several lives.

However, there’s little time for lovey-dovey stuff. Jed has to teach everyone to be a resistance fighter — it takes about 10 minutes before the bewildered adolescents evolve into a combination of Minutemen and Rambo — and then they have to arm themselves.

Fortunately there’s no shortage of automatic weapons in and around Spokane. They’re kind of crappy, but they’re good enough to ambush the enemy and steal their good, North Korean ones.

The fun in Red Dawn is in trying to decipher the political subtext. For instance, Jed — a man who realizes the truth in the old expression, “Never get involved in a land war in the Pacific Northwest” — creates his heroic guerrilla force while acknowledging that this is the opposite of what has happened in recent American history. This time the terrorists are the good guys, and he admits he has learned lessons from the Viet Cong and the mujahedeen.

The result is America as the feisty underdog. “For them, this is just a place, but for us, this is home,” he says, as the Wolverines ambush the enemy in battles staged by director Dan Bradley with more gung-ho spirit than coherence. By the end, we appreciate the wisdom of the character who says, “Dude, we’re living Call of Duty. And it sucks.” That’s a big 10-4, soldier.